Final Fantasy Legend II: The Good!

Most of my posts about Final Fantasy Legend II have been rather negative thus far. You might get the impression that I hate the game, and I would understand thinking that way, but I really don't. It has some good parts to it and some bad parts to it and I've mostly felt like discussing the bad parts. Today, let's talk good stuff.

I really enjoy combat with mutants. My mutant right now has the following possible actions:

• Cast a big damage spell that hits all the enemies. (15 times between rests.)
• Cast a big damage spell that hits one group of enemies. (15 times between rests.)
• Cast a bid damage spell that hits one group of enemies with a different element. (15 times between rests.)
• Attack for mediocre damage with a weapon that breaks after 50 uses total.

Depending on how many fights I'm going to do between rests I need to spend some time on anemic beatdown but it turns out that's ok. FFLII uses the same sort of idea behind gaining stats as FFII did only it seems to be actually random here instead of terribly abusive in FFII. The mediocre weapon I'm using is agility based, so if I attack with it I have a chance to gain an agility stat. (Casting a spell gives a chance to gain a mana stat.) Agility is used for all sorts of things and I want to level it up so I'm pretty happy spending the easier random encounters swinging.

The random encounters are really unbalanced in terms of difficulty. Sometimes I fight one dude. Sometimes I fight three groups of three dudes. This could be terrible, but just getting into fights can proc stat ups for my human and mutant so I don't mind the small fights. My robots are built pretty much full on defense so I don't die to the 9-pulls, my mutant can kill most of them with one spell, and I get a lot of gold to spend on powering up my robots so I don't mind the big fights either.

The story is interesting thus far. It's still not clear why I'm doing what I'm doing other than I wanted to follow in my father's footsteps and gather magi. The game uses the same world make-up as the original FFL with a tower in the middle connecting a series of very different worlds. It's a neat way to make sense of having a desert dungeon, and a water dungeon, and a giant town, and so on. Often in games like this they're all crammed onto the same world and it doesn't really make a lot of sense but I find it works here. (The random barriers preventing entry to the next world until I get enough magi don't make sense... How can anyone else advance between worlds when you need every single magi on the planet to open the door? I have it all!)

I fixed my sound problem by muting the emulator entirely. I now run a youtube playlist of music from a different Final Fantasy game while I'm playing.

I like that it has three saved game slots. Now that I've hooked an xBox 360 controller up to my laptop and use it to control the game it's annoying to use the emulator save states function. I can save everywhere that isn't in a fight do so I don't feel the need to save state at all.